Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

By : Jessica Plowman

3.7 (3)

Buy this Book

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

3.7 (3)

By: Jessica Plowman

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

With the ability to put players directly in the game, virtual reality gives users the chance to experience digital worlds directly. Nevertheless, many designers are unsure where to start when working with this amazing technology. With this book, you will learn user experience design processes and create immersive gameplay experiences designed for entertainment and player comfort. Using the power of Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprint visual scripting language, you will build player interaction and locomotion systems from scratch and use these flexible systems to create a sample game, as well as develop functional 2D and 3D user interfaces for players to interact with. And also learn the best practices for creating game art for virtual reality. Finally, you will learn how to test your application with your target audience and finalize your game for distribution. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge to be able to make the leap from traditional game development to creating immersive virtual reality experiences using Unreal Engine 4.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

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Free Chapter

Introducing VR Technology in Unreal Engine 4

Why use Unreal Engine 4 for VR?

What types of VR Technology are available to developers?

Pros and cons of popular VR headsets

Limitations of VR

Introducing our sample project – Server 17

Summary

Locomotion, Design, and Starting Our Project

The Human-Centered Design process

Choosing our locomotion method

Setting up new game files in UE4

Project setup

Summary

Exploring Riveting Gameplay in Virtual Reality

What does VR bring to video games?

Popular gameplay mechanics

Designing the gameplay for Server 17

Summary

User Interface and User Experience inside VR

What is UX design?

User interfaces in VR

Designing the UI elements for Server 17

Summary

Creating Optimized Game Art for VR in UE4

Performance is key

Artistic limitations in VR

Performance-boosting techniques

Measuring ingame performance

Summary

Finalizing Our VR Game and Next Steps

The importance of game testing

Collecting testing data

Preparing for distribution

Summary

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Measuring ingame performance

Over and over again, I have mentioned-performance as the most important consideration for a VR game. Yet, we have not talked about how to measure performance inside Unreal Engine 4 so that we can know whether we are optimizing well or not. Let's take a look at the tools we have available.

UE4 has an amazing number of performance profiling tools available as part of the game engine, more than I could discuss in this one-quick-start guide. However, I do want to discuss a couple that are relevant to our discussion: the Stat commands and the GPU Visualizer:

Stat command statistics

There are several Stat commands that can be useful for us to determine our performance. They are accessed by opening Accessing the console with the tilde key and typing in the following commands (they are not case-sensitive):